


Simplicity

by MrProphet



Category: The Immortals - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 14:16:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10698735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Simplicity

A busy man yearns for leisure, a simple man for sophistication, even as a hungry man yearns for food. Yet even so, as a man well-fed on rich meats craves little but water and rest, so the idle man craves occupation, or at least diversion, and a man of true sophistication often longs for the simplicity of the past, albeit in a form distilled through the lens of nostalgia and the filters of technology.

Take war as our example.

Once, we fought with our hands and our teeth, and the first manlike ape-beast to curl his fingers into the precursor to a fist would have been accounted a genius and a revolutionary. Then came stones and clubs and the first crude axes and spears, and with them the sling and the atlatl. What inspired works those were; what a masterpiece of mathematical reasoning to apply the complex mechanics of force and lever to so greatly increase the deadly power of the human body.

The bow came next, a truly revolutionary concept. Before that the process of discovery is simple enough; a taller man, one with longer arms, throws harder, so if you can not stretch your arm find the means to extend it artificially. How did that ever translate into bending a branch in two and binding the ends with gut?

From there we can follow the line to the crossbow, and then explosives naturally lead to the gun in its increasing sophistication and thence to the missile. Lasers and atomic weapons weren't even the work of warriors; death had become the business of a new god, science. In time, war became clinical, sterile; the touch of a button could decimate a country. When we learned to free ourselves from death, what monsters we could have become, the undying lords of millions of years of killing sophistication.

Thankfully, those of us who most craved war craved also the most brutal kind of simplicity; the scent of blood in their nostrils, the crack of bone beneath their hands. Even thus they were a plague that threatened to wipe out humanity, but it was their very savage simplicity that showed us how to destroy them.

We had thought that the immortality we had gained was without limit; they taught us that, by some quirk of science or veneance of nature, one immortal held the power to kill another, but only close to. Only when hand smote flesh would the deathless nature of the latter be overcome by the eternal puissance of the former and undying flesh laid mortally low.

So fell those who had sought to claim the mantle of godhood, not by blade or bow but to the rending hands of our kin. Reduced to such barbarity in our desperate struggle, we strove to reclaim our sophistication by forging weapons that bore the same uncanny power as our hands. Some forged that strength into blades or hammers, others merely learned to infuse their own power into whatever weapons they bore.

Many considered the Epirus Bow to be a step too far. Capable of undoing any work of our science at a distance of miles, it threatened to restore to our wars the spurious cleanliness of a nuclear age. Even in a mortal's hands that bow could kill any one of us, before we knew that the threat was even there. Perhaps that was why it was hidden away, even before the war was over. Perhaps that was why its whereabouts was forgotten so thoroughly that it alone survived the purging of technology from the surface world and the forced return of mankind to a state of savagery, from which they would yearn once more for sophistication; a state of conflict form which they would desire peace.

It should not have mattered that the bow survived, but in Hyperion  _they_  found a man who had no desire for sophistication; for whom barbarism was merely a spur to greater barbarism, war a spur to war. 

In him, the Titans found a man who yearned only for destruction. A simple man, who will burn the world to ash.


End file.
